Funny Lindows story... what should I do?

[TheDebater]

Funny story - I was psyched about installing lindows on my extra computer, i'd never used linux, and i wanted to check out this distribution, see how it is etc. I tried to install over XP but i got this funny message from lindows that I didnt have a hard drive to install to. I'm thinking WTF, well maybe the NTFS file system is messing with it or something. I proceed to wipe the hard drive reformat etc and go to reinistall lindows. Once again no hard drive. I was at a loss for what to do and began thinking maybe it was my onboard promise ATA100 controller on my older A7V. I checked around the Lindows forums... sure enough Lindows 4.5 does not currently support Promise ATA/Raid controllers. In other words, if you are one of the thousands of users out there with a promise controller, youre screwed. Now I have a clean computer and no OS unless i want to move my HD off the controller and down to an ATA66 channel... Any suggestions?

 

[cleverhandle]

Seems pretty obvious... use a real distro or move your hard drive to ATA66. Unless it's a new, very high-performance drive, you're not gaining anything over ATA66 anyway.

 

[Abzstrak]

Originally posted by: cleverhandle
Seems pretty obvious... use a real distro or move your hard drive to ATA66. Unless it's a new, very high-performance drive, you're not gaining anything over ATA66 anyway.

100% agree

 

[TheDebater]

Thanks

 

[boshuter]

if you are one of the thousands of users out there

That's the most amazing thing..... I can't believe that many people actually tried Lindows :Q


Use Windows or a "real" distro, like cleverhandle suggested.

 

[drag]

Most of what you have to do to make Lindows real is to do these commands:

echo "deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free" > /etc/apt/sources.list

echo "deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian-non-US unstable non-US/main non-US/contrib non-US/non-free" >> /etc/apt/sources.list

apt-get update

apt-get dist-upgrade


I am about 75% sure that will work out well and will go a long way to solving the "lindows problem". No garrentee, though.

check it out

(not for amatures(inexperianced I realy mean), though. )

 

[cleverhandle]

Originally posted by: drag
I am about 75% sure that will work out well and will go a long way to solving the "lindows problem". No garrentee, though.

I don't think it would help with this particular problem. He can't even get the system to install on the Promise controller, which means that the installation kernel and maybe other scripts don't support.

Now could you fix that? Sure, you could hack on the installation routine, insert a new kernel, and build a new ISO. But if you could do that, you wouldn't be using Lindows.

 

[wetcat007]

Use Mandrake, problem solved.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Originally posted by: cleverhandle
Seems pretty obvious... use a real distro or move your hard drive to ATA66. Unless it's a new, very high-performance drive, you're not gaining anything over ATA66 anyway.

Even the newest IDE drives can't push 66MB/s from the disk, can they? Cache reads can obviously use ATA100, but I'm not sure that would really make any noticeable difference.

 

[cleverhandle]

The Raptors can stream over 70 MB/sec max (at the beginning of the disk), and most of the new 7200 RPM drives top out at about 60 MB/sec. Given some ATA overhead and the right locations on the disk, these might barely be limited by ATA66. But yeah, for all intents and purposes, it makes no difference.

 

[TheDebater]

Alright, so if i'd like to try a relatively easy, user friendly, distribution of linux with a good GUI, what would you suggest?

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: cleverhandle

Originally posted by: drag
I am about 75% sure that will work out well and will go a long way to solving the "lindows problem". No garrentee, though.

I don't think it would help with this particular problem. He can't even get the system to install on the Promise controller, which means that the installation kernel and maybe other scripts don't support.

Now could you fix that? Sure, you could hack on the installation routine, insert a new kernel, and build a new ISO. But if you could do that, you wouldn't be using Lindows.

I didn't say it WOULD fix it. I am saying that it would eventually help him out later on down the road. He can use lindows for now with the confidence that he can always upgrade later on, that's all.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Not very funny. Promise sucks anyways.

 

[cleverhandle]

Originally posted by: TheDebater
Alright, so if i'd like to try a relatively easy, user friendly, distribution of linux with a good GUI, what would you suggest?

Fedora, Mandrake, SuSE. Probably others, too. Debian is friendly in its own unusual way. Gentoo is unfriendly, but well documented, which counts for something. Slackware is unfriendly, but simple to understand.

Just pick something. Doesn't matter too much what. Just be sure to get the most recent version of whatever you pick to get the best hardware support.

 

[Zelmo3]

I ended up with SuSE on both my destop and laptop after fighting with Fedora on the laptop and Gentoo on the desktop. SuSE has a very good user interface and is easy to get the hang of.